Salt the Earth Behind You
by attackfishscales
Summary: Zuko found Mai in an Earth Kingdom village. He didn't know what she was doing there until she stopped Zhao from killing him, with earthbending. And with her secrets stripped away, Mai has precious little time to decide whether to run. Avatar Mai AU.


Written for Fall Maiko Week 2018. Part of my Fire Avatar Mai AU. More information for this AU can be found at my Tumblr (username attackfish) under the #Fire Avatar Mai tag.

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Salt the Earth Behind You

 **Dawn**

The door made a shriek as it ground against the floor of her cell. Mai sat up primly, letting her hands fall into her lap. She refused to flinch away from the sound or the sudden spill of light. She refused to blink, or shy away, or cringe down, or show any weakness at all.

It was Iroh. He left the door open, but he put himself between her and the chance to run. "That was a very stupid thing you did."

Mai didn't laugh, but it was a near thing. "Tell me something I don't know."

"I never would have let that blow land," he tried to explain. "I expected it. That is what Zhao is like. He shows no honor in defeat. You should have stayed hidden. I was ready to take care of it."

"I know." Mai spit it out. "I should have figured. But I didn't." It was kind of hard to think and put all the pieces together in the moment, when there was a hand raised against someone she cared about. It was kind of hard to remember she had to be afraid of Zuko too.

"Is there still a chance we can convince him I'm just an earthbender?" she asked, already knowing the answer.

Iroh shook his head. "It is what we told Zhao. He is allowing us to leave with you and your brother. Maybe I should warn you, he is enjoying the task of writing to my brother to tell him all about how you ran to spare your family the scandal of two earthbending children."

What would the Firelord think, Mai wondered, when he heard? Would he be ashamed for his son, or would he be relieved to see him take himself and his heirs so thoroughly out the succession by romancing an earthbender? Would he sneer, as Zhao was already sneering about the appropriateness of such a pairing, the exiled prince and earthbender halfbreed? What would Azula think? Would she suspect the truth?

She knew what her parents would think. She could almost hear the recriminations that would immediately start flying between them as they battled over which of them could have brought tainted blood into the marriage.

"Does Zuko want to beat the letter, or does he want to let it drop before sweeping in with the truth?" She asked. General Iroh raised his eyebrows at her. Mai gazed back defiantly. "How does he want to use me?"

"That is a question you will have to ask him," Iroh replied, his polite, habitual smile still in place, but it reached nowhere near his eyes, which were sad and tired, and told Mai much more than she wanted to know. "Once we have gotten you back on the ship and away from Zhao."

Mai made sure the general was watching when she rolled her eyes. But she followed him out of the cell and into the shifting orange and yellow sunrise, down to Zuko's ship in the harbor below.

 **Stone**

It was perhaps fitting that Mai mastered earthbending first. For as long as she could remember, her face had always felt as if it were carved from stone. Zuko kept glancing out the viewports in the direction of Zhao's port, as if he expected someone to be following, to chase them down and drag them back. Mai sat at the table, face still and cold, and waited for him to break first.

But he didn't, and in the end, it was Mai who was forced to cut the silence short. "Well?"

"I don't think he's following us," Zuko answered, unscarred eye twitching with nerves. "I think we're okay."

Mai narrowed her eyes and favored him with a vicious look. _We're not okay,_ she wanted to yell at him. _And Zhao has nothing to do with it._ "Why would he? He has no idea what I am."

"Yeah," Zuko said absently. "I guess."

"What are you planning to do at the border?"

Zuko stopped. The frenetic energy vibrating through him was suddenly gone, and his whole body went still. "What do you mean?"

Mai stared him straight in the eyes and didn't blink. "What are you going to say to the captain of the first patrol boat that stops you in Fire Nation waters? Or what about if you make it all the way to the Gates of Azulon?"

"As soon as we're far away from Zhao, I'll send my father word, and he'll rescind the banishment." Zuko crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes, failing completely to hide his anxiety. "The border won't be a problem after that."

Out of the corner of her eye, Mai could see General Iroh hustling the helmsman and a few of the crewmen out of the cockpit. Mai waited until he had finished, until he had shut the heavy metal door and taken the helm himself, before responding. She braced herself. "What if he doesn't rescind your banishment?"

"What?" Zuko yelped, his unscarred eye wide with stunned confusion. "Of course he will! Those are the terms, find the Avatar, take the avatar back to the Fire Nation."

 _Did you really think the Firelord thought you would ever find the Avatar?_ Mai wanted to ask. She wanted to ask, but she dreaded the thought of actually hearing his answer. Better to keep that question locked away inside her own mind. _Do you really think he ever thought he would have to keep his word?_

"That's not going to happen," Zuko assured her. Or assured himself. She knew which was more likely.

"And what if it does? What if they arrest you and try to take me back themselves?" It felt as if every word she said was a stone she had skipped across a lake, skimming the water when all she wanted was for it to sink in.

"That's not going to happen," Zuko repeated, teeth gritted. "It won't. I did what I was supposed to. I found the Avatar and I'm taking you home."

 **River**

When Mai had first come to the Earth Kingdom village on the eastern coast, her teacher had taken her to the mouth of the river, and told her to plant her feet in the sand and the mud, and feel down for the rock far down beneath her. Mai had thought it was impossible. Later her teacher would tell her to feel for the earth in the mud and sand, and to feel for the earth dissolved in the brackish water lapping at her legs.

Sifu Liu was old and squat, and weathered like the driftwood that washed up on the shore. She was all quiet wisdom and uncanny knowledge, and yet she had taken one look at Tom Tom's yellow eyes and her own pale skin, and drawn all the wrong conclusions. She made jokes about rich city girls with their long dresses and parasols, who didn't know what the sun was, and no matter how many times Mai called Tom Tom her brother, she looked at them with that sad, knowing look.

She was never going to forget the look in Sifu Liu's eyes when Mai walked out and called the Fire Prince by his name, and he had called Mai by hers.

She took her shoes off and pressed her feet to the cold metal of the ship's deck. She could feel the earth inside it, and even if she couldn't bend it any more than she could bend the salt in the sea, she could let it steady her, soothe her, to ground her. She closed her eyes and let her heartbeat slow and planted her feet like the ship's deck was the heart of the earth itself. As they neared the equator, the metal would warm until it grew so hot she would be able to feel it sizzling through the soles of the shoes she wouldn't dare take off. When she most needed grounding, it would be taken from her. She had to prepare herself.

Sifu Liu had asked her once if she thought an earthbender could bend water. Mai hadn't let herself laugh, only shaken her head. Sifu Liu had simply smiled her cunning old woman smile, and in that moment, Msi had remembered all the stories she had ever heard in the home islands, of earthquakes so powerful they had reversed the course of rivers, or terrible ones far offshore that sent huge, deadly waves far inland to scour the islands bare. She had pointed at the river, and told Mai that water always flowed down, and if an earthbender wanted to bend water, all she had to do was change where down was.

Zuko would always flow toward home, and she knew she had been an idiot if she had thought she could change where home was for him. She had been such an idiot, so unbearably stupid and hopeful, and now all she could do was face northwards as they all flowed toward home, pulled along in Zuko's inescapable wake.

 **Dance**

There were times when Mai was practicing airbending that she swore she could see someone out of the corner of her eye bending with her, and sometimes, as she struggled to follow the unmoving pictures in scrolls, she swore she could hear him saying, "No, like this."

She knew as surely as she knew her own name that his name was Aang, and that he had never had a chance to be any older than she saw him, dead as a child, with no Air Nation army to defend him, no matter what she had learned in school.

She didn't have to airbend in the dead of night anymore, and she found herself wondering if anybody else could see him.

Probably not. They would have said something.

Sometimes, now that he knew, Zuko came out on deck to train with her, and they would firebend together under Iroh's watchful eye, her brother asleep in the general's capacious lap. Their bodies moved in tune with each other, finding a rhythm between hers and his, fire leaping from hands and feet as the deck rolled under them. They moved through katas together, ones Zuko had mastered as a child, ones she was only beginning to master. There was a constant awareness of his body moving with hers, almost as if the space between them stretched and snapped back like a spring.

Sometimes they sparred, and her whole body twanged and jangled with the knowledge that soon their fights might become real.

She leaned against him where he lay, sprawled on the deck, even his anxious bad temper burned away for a time, exhausted into oblivion. "What do you think it will be like when we win?" she asked, her head against his chest, his heartbeat reverberating through her skull. "When we run out of territory to conquer?"

"I don't know." He shrugged, or tried to. She was in the way. "I guess there will be peace then."

"Sure," Mai whispered. Mai knew. She knew enough anyway. Gone would be the places like the village at the mouth of the river. Gone would be the places for people Ozai didn't want. The world would be in his hands, and then Azula's and there would be nowhere that was not under their power, nowhere out of the way, or hidden enough. Nowhere. She wondered where he would try to throw his son away to when all the world was Fire Nation. "The Avatar is supposed to bring peace."

"Well here's your chance," he mumbled, his fingers running through her hair. It was sweaty and he was sweaty, and the deck was cool.

"I don't know," she said neutrally, trying to keep… everything she was feeling, all of it, the weight of the world, out of her voice. "What would we do with peace anyway?"

Zuko laughed breathlessly. "We'd figure it out."

Mai hummed something that might have been agreement and turned her head to watch the sea birds wheeling and dancing on the wind.

 **Run**

"I'm sorry." The general stood above her, face in shadow.

"I know." Mai told him, pressing her brother, mercifully asleep, to her chest. "You shouldn't be."

"I packed you something to eat," he said. "I left it in the cockpit. It's only leftovers, but it's something."

"Thank you," she said automatically. Neither of them mentioned the provisions she had pilfered from the ship's hold that he must have seen if he had been inside the skiff's tiny cockpit. Provisions that would get her all the way to Kyoshi Island if she was careful. They revered the Avatar there, or so she had heard. They could give her safe passage to the North Pole.

"Do not stray too far from the coast," he warned. "The skiff was not made for open ocean."

Mai nodded, already knowing she had little choice but to disobey. "Will you tell him good bye for me?"

He eyed her seriously. "I will thank him on your behalf for the airbending scrolls."

Mai couldn't stop herself from laughing. It came out of her fast and brutal, like something that didn't belong in her body. And if her laughter was rough with pain and there were tears in her eyes, the old general would never be so unkind as to mention it. It occurred to her that she didn't know which bothered her more, that laughter had to be torn from her unwillingly. Or that it still could be. "What are you going to tell him?"

General Iroh smiled. "I do not plan to tell him anything at all."

There were ten thousand things she should be saying to him, she knew, words of gratitude, words of remorse, words of comfort, but she didn't know how to find them, and shape them into something that mattered. Instead, she just nodded.

The steamer skiff slid down the ramp into the dark water below. She stared fixedly at him as the skiff floated away, until the ship's ramp raised, blocking him from view. With one last glance at Zuko's ship, she carried her brother into the cockpit and set him down on the small cot they would have to share. The food the general had promised was wrapped in brown paper, sitting on a low table. Next to the packages was a small wooden disk. She bent a small flame and held it up to the light. A Pai Sho tile, the white lotus, she thought. The general would miss it when he realized it was gone.

With a shaky sigh, Mai set it down and stepped up to the skiff's miniature ship's wheel. Breathing the way the general had shown her, she bent the flames in the boiler high and spun the wheel to turn them around. The sun would rise soon, and she would follow the sea birds to the coast and follow it south as far as she could. But in the meantime, she needed to put as much distance between her and Zuko's ship as possible.

 **Scatter**

She should have been more careful. She knew that with an icy cold certainty the second she saw him, the second his eyes locked onto hers and his mouth parted with recognition. This could have been avoided if she had been smarter.

With Tom Tom asleep in her arms, there was no real way to fight, but she was wearing green, and in an Earth Kingdom village. She screamed with fear that was only half-pretend, and ran. Tom Tom woke up and started screaming too, and any other time, Mai would have wished she could strangle him, but just now, she loved him for it. She bent low walls in the middle of the street that he had to clamber over as he gave chase, and that some poor village official was going to have owl-kittens over, but that made her look unquestionably like a poor Earth Kingdom girl, running from the Fire Prince.

It only took Zuko a moment to realize what she had done as village constables and dock tough guys united to block his way. He snarled, and Mai had to hold in her laughter as she sprinted down the coast to the little cove where she had hidden the skiff.

Tom Tom had quieted by the time she had reached the water, and was blinking at her blearily as she untied the mooring ropes when he looked behind them and shouted gleefully, "Zuzu!"

Mai nearly dropped him. As it was, she shoved him onto the skiff and whirled around to face Zuko. "Where are your crew?"

He eyed her fighting stance with what might have been shock. Mai couldn't say for sure. She didn't want it to be. "I wanted to talk to you alone."

"You're not going to convince me to come back with you, if that's what you're here for," she snapped. "If you want to capture me, you'll have to take me by force."

"Mai-"

"Did you even _think,"_ she cut him off. "About what your father plans to do with the Avatar? That maybe I didn't tell you, because I didn't want to go back?"

That's not going to happen to you!" he yelled.

Why not?" Mai shot back. "Do think my parents will try to protect me? Maybe because your father and sister will have other ways they will want to use me?" She could hear Tom Tom scrambling around on the deck, and if she had ever cared to hear this, she didn't now.

He looked down. Mai wrenched the mooring rope free of the tree she had tied it to. She hurled herself up over the side of the skiff and landed in a couch. "Did you ever send the hawk? About me?"

"No," he whispered below.

The breath punched its way out of her at her relief. "Good." Mai shut her brother in the cockpit and fired up the boiler, and didn't look back at Zuko. "Don't."

He wouldn't, she knew. He couldn't risk someone else capturing her.

 **Dusk**

It was safest, Mai figured, to sleep ashore, moored safely out of reach of the wild ocean storms. Or maybe it was safest not to sleep at all. But that second possibility was unfortunately out of reach, so evening found the small skiff tucked away out of sight of the ocean behind a rocky outcrop, her brother pinned to her lap in a desperate attempt to make him eat before digging his hands into the wet sand. He squirmed discontentedly and she shoved a ball of smooshed up rice into his mouth.

With every passing moment, it became harder to force herself not to rise and peer over the rocks out to sea for Zuko's ship. It was harder still to keep from scanning the land. She wore green, and had a story ready if some Earth Kingdom villager saw her, but she didn't think anybody would. This stretch of the Earth Kingdom coast was too deserted, with fresh water and good soil too scarce and wind storms too frequent. It was as safe as anything was now.

When Tom Tom had eaten as much roast duck, rice, and cabbage as she had any real hope of getting into him, she let him go and watched him toddle along the sand and rocks, and splash in a shallow tidal pool, sheltered from the waves.

The sand was cool on her feet as she pictured the airbending scrolls back on the skiff, and when she swung her body through the movements of the form, the sand rose, buffeted into the air on the wind the raised. Tom Tom left his pool and crawled close, raising his arms, giggling, to catch the swirling sand. She wondered suddenly what he would remember of this strange, sad little journey in the years to come, if he would remember it at all.

Next to him on the sand sat Aang, the airbending boy, forever twelve years old, a ghostly hand on her brother's shoulder. Tom Tom didn't seem to notice, his hands in the air, waiting for the sand to move again. Maybe it made sense. Maybe. He was her ghost, not her brother's. Mai swallowed and ran through the form again.

If Tom Tom hadn't been there, if it had just been her and her ghosts, maybe she would have screamed, maybe even cried. Her chest itched with the need to demand answers, to ask if this is what it had been like for them, for any of them.

Maybe if Tom Tom hadn't been there, she would have, but he was, and it would have scared him, so she couldn't. It wasn't okay. It wasn't allowed.

Zuko was still out there, searching for her, and she had no idea how to deal with just how much of her wanted him to find her.

Air was the element of freedom, but as she stared out at the faint remnants of orange on the horizon, the last thing in the world she felt was free.


End file.
